


Biorhythms

by Bellybits



Series: Circadian [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alien Biology, Aliens, Character Study, Galra Keith (Voltron), Gen, M/M, Multi, Tagging as I go, This is a thinly veiled bio paper tbh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-28
Updated: 2017-08-30
Packaged: 2018-12-20 20:37:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11928804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bellybits/pseuds/Bellybits
Summary: Biology is indisputably flexible.Nothing is solid fact, processes we’re so sure of are thrown entirely out of line by unseen factors and yet it will lead to only two things; living through the disruption or dying.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This was me, as a biological anthropologist and someone who is incredibly passionate and well studied in biology, writting a fan fic about alien junk. It may, at some point, include actual alien junk as well. I'm tired of shitty inaccurate A/B/O tropes about how sex and biology work, so I decided why not create the content you want to see in the world. Many of my theoretical baisis come from 'Evolutions Rainbow' by Joan Roughgarden.
> 
> If you wana talk alien biology hit me up in the comments section or on my blog: Belly-Bits.tumblr.com

If he had been dealt a better hand in life, Keith thinks he would have studied biology. 

He was fascinated by the way organic life worked, the cycles that almost all living things went through. It was comforting knowing that death, while imminent, was something that happened to everything. It was natural, and most of the time a force of good for an ecosystem. 

Death was a part of life. Its process and its rituals were different for all species, all cultures, and now all planets. The way that most humans interacted with it was something Keith never understood.

Each foster home he’d been passed through had different traditions. The devoutly Christian homes were his least favorite, focused on the painful aspect of mourning and almost passive aggressive in their grief over the life of the thing that had died. His Jewish and Catholic hosts were more comfortable, less intent on the minute details of the personal life and more on the effect they’d had on the world. 

Keith hadn’t found himself mourning in any of those ways when he lost Shiro. He was sad, obviously, but it felt deeper than that; as if a cycle was interrupted. He could feel, somewhere in his mind, that something was deeply wrong. Shiro disappearing was like Keith had woken up missing the features of one-half of his body, ugly and surreal. 

Death is expected in interstellar travel to some degree. This wasn’t death. Something had happened, and he had no time to be blinded by grief while he searched for the answers. Keith could feel in his gut that he wasn’t dead, that nature had been scorned of the proper ritual.

Biology is indisputably flexible. Nothing is solid fact, processes we’re so sure of are thrown entirely out of line by unseen factors and yet it will lead to only two things; living through the disruption or dying. Basal chemical interactions can be thrown into flux when a variable is unaccounted for. Humanity does not have all the answers, and they certainly didn’t have the ultimate perspective even within the confines of earth.There are Arctic sponges that exist on a timeline closer to Zarkon’s than a human’s. Those sponges may live to see both the rise and the fall of the Galra empire and have it be only a blip on their lifetime.

He would have loved to study biology.

But, fighter class pilots got larger stipends than the research teams. Keith needed that money, he had no family to pay his tuition and no home to fall back on when he graduated. He didn't have the time or resources other graduates did to find a new job. He gave up his desire to study organic life and put all his effort into honing his piloting skills. Then after Shiro’s disappearance and his own subsequent expulsion, he put it into figuring out what was calling to him in the desert.

So when he found out that he himself was a genetic mystery, Keith was the first to start documenting anything deviating from his knowledge of human biology. He was likely the only hybrid with human DNA, seeing as the Galra hadn’t made obvious contact with Terra Firma other than him.

Human was a dangerous species to be, terrifyingly adaptable. Easy to change and mold to conditions that crippled most other living things. They were hard to tire out, hard to poison, and tough to put out of commission short of total brain death or total dismemberment. 

To be part of a species as steadfast as the Galra means that Keith has two of the sturdiest bloodlines that's survived sentience so far aside from Aletans. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though he was having a hard time seeing how it could be good.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Formatting is a bitch and I wanna die.

Pidge, of course, was interested as well. But her expertise wasn’t focused in natural sciences, she couldn’t actually code around his funky genome like she wanted to; organic life is too complicated, too messy. Keith did offer her the fact that she and Hunk could help him by engineering a bioprinter for him. It would be much easier to experiment with tissues and rNA sequences if he had a solid material source that didn’t involve filleting himself. Almost immediately she had sped out of the castles labs to go and find Hunk, spouting something about having wanted to put her rip of CRISPR tech into practice anyway.

 

As far as Keith knew the Galra were a very diverse species, their physiology spanning a broad spectrum of phenotypes. He was compiling his scant knowledge in a data pad, but the best he had were theories with no solid confirmation. It was better if he tried to get what he knew together first before asking someone else, it made him feel less vulnerable about not really knowing anything.

 

_ There are some very similar to felines, with broad lateral ears and coats of soft looking fur. They likely have keratin on their tongues or some kind of grooming structure.  _

 

_ Note: scrape tongue to look at under microscope. _

 

_ Some are much more reptilian, with three toed feet and soft python like skin. Others looked more generically humanoid, most had the telling lavender complexion and fluorescent yellow eyes that pointed towards a well-developed tapetum lucidum and darker blue blood.  _

 

_ Note: Ask other humans for some blood in least creepy way possible _

 

_ The glowing of their eyes, bioluminescence almost like fireflies, suggested that the Galran home planet had periods of extremely low light that requires animals to create their own to see by. But it must have also had enough natural light so that they didn’t lose their sight entirely like cave animals and moles.  _

 

_ But that would mean that they have shitty eyesight in general naturally, maybe the empire forces natural selection in the military by only allowing Galra with the best eyesight to serve and have kids?  _

 

_ Note: Ask Kolivan about general Galran sight. _

_ Note: Maybe mating? Too personal, ask later dumbass. _

 

All of the Galra, however, are very large. They’re tall, the more militaristic of them incredibly strong and well muscled. Thace and Kolivan reaching almost a head and a half above Hunk, Antok nearly twice as tall as Shiro and three times the width.  

 

_ Their proportions tended toward lanky whip fast limbs, hands reaching down past their knees like gibbons. They likely evolved on a planet with an atmosphere higher in oxygen and with a mixture of dense forests and sprawling plains topography.  _

 

_ They don’t seem to have any sort of legitimate dimorphism, be it sexual or social. The Galra who seemed to grow the equivalent of manes didn’t strike as ‘male’, ‘female’, or biologically hermaphroditic, they were not more aggressive than the average soldier either.  _

 

Keith supposed that he could attempt to classify Galran sexes, but that would involve directly comparing gamete sizes and he wasn’t exactly on that level with any of the blade members. 

 

_ They probably don’t have anything close to the same chromosomal make up as humans. Even the more mammalian subspecies didn’t seem to have any sort of mammary growths.  _

 

_ Maybe they’re like platypuses, secreting milk through their skin rather than from breasts? _

 

_ Note: Babies? _

 

Keith really hoped he never started lactating from his face.  

 

He couldn’t really tell if the Galra had any sort of gender structure either, he’d have to ask Kolivan and the other blades- or the Alteans. Though it stank of disrespect to ask Allura or Coran when he had primary sources at arms reach.

 

Keith suppressed a shiver at the thought of having to go through the trials again for his answer. Knowledge or death his ass.

 

_ …. Ugh _

 

Huffing out a sigh Keith looked down to his messy datapad, resting so innocently in his lap despite it holding the only information he had about his own heritage. The diversity of the Galra in of itself made it easier to see how there could be so many half breeds, Lotor’s gang was chock full of them. 

 

He rubbed gently at his temples, resigning himself to the fact that he would have to go to the blade to get any further in his research. It’s not that he hated them, he was just radically uncomfortable with the way they all looked at him. Like something volatile and fragile at the same time. A child soldier.

 

Keith heaved himself to his feet, stowing the datapad in the breast pocket of his jacket. The lab he had claimed was well stocked, clearly meant to house a much larger research team. It had quickly become a cluttered mess, theories and testing proposals glowing from the Altean version of a white board. 

 

He had Pidge translate all the labels in the storage closet, it wouldn't do him well to try and make a solution of acid rather than water. He had enough materials to do a few DNA extractions, enzymes and salt and alcohol. There were also agar plates and dye sets so he could roughly lay out genome patterns when he needed. Hopefully, he could determine what kind of subspecies his Galra parent was by comparing his sequence to ones collected from the blade.

 

As he left the lab he locked the fume hood and shut off the lights, the gas lines would automatically seal after five minutes of disuse. He had a stack of test tubes in one hand and a new package of medical swabs in the other, if his luck held there weren't any customs against cheek swipes in the blade and he could take his samples quickly.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is it for this particular arch. I'll be making this part of a series about Keith and his weird alien self.

Keith made his way slowly out of the research wing of the castle, the heels of his boots clicking against the polished floors and echoing down the hallways. The blade members were likely in the common room, that or the training deck. They didn’t have much to do right now, Zarkon was dead and Lotor had made it abundantly clear that he refused to follow in his father's outright genocidal path. They still didn’t know his plans, but the firefight had ceased for the time being. 

 

It was ominous like waiting for the aftershocks after a nasty earthquake, you know they're coming but not when or how bad they’ll be.

 

Kolivan looks up sharply when Keith knock on the archway leading into the common room; he’s found that the blade hates being startled and that not announcing your presence has the real possibility of you ending up with a knife to your throat. The older man’s large ears were facing forward, twitching idly as other members of the blade milled about. 

 

“Please, come in paladin,” Kolivan rumbles, his deep voice easily cutting through the din surrounding him.

 

Keith steps forward and nods his thanks. As he walks through the space he notes Antok sitting in a plush looking chair, sipping some brand of Altean tea from a cup tightly held by his tail.  _ Prehensile. _ An image of Lance’s ecstatic face and tactless whispers of ‘Night Crawler!’ flashes in Keiths mind and he finds himself absently smiling as he approaches Kolivan. 

 

“I need something. If that's alright?” Keith asks, blunt as always, his voice a bit rough after hours of disuse from being cooped up in the lab. 

 

Kolivan closes the datapad he'd been looking over, from the corner of his eye Keith sees Antok set down his tea cup. 

 

“That, of course, depends on the nature of your request young one.” Kolivan says, his eyebrow with the scar through it ticking up in what Keith reads as amusement. Ulaz and Thace look up from their game of go, curiosity clear on their faces. 

 

He swallows, switching the cotton swabs into the hand with the test tubes and rubs his now free hand against the back of his neck. 

 

He regrets not going directly to Ulaz, the man was a medical technician and researcher after all. But now it was too late, he held the attention of the whole room as he fidgeted where he stood. 

 

Keith cleared his throat.

 

“I’m trying to figure out what type of Galra my parent is, and I-,” He cuts himself off with a nervous cough. The glowing eyes of the blade members were unnerving in the fluorescent light of the castle’s artificial day. 

 

“I need.. At least I think I do. A, uh, a control set of DNA samples to compare against.” Keith’s face flares red as Kolivan’s other eyebrow raises, he can hear Ulaz chuckling from his side as he rises to his feet. 

 

“Keith, if you needed help with this all you had to do was ask. You’ve already proven your worth. You’re a member of the blade, we trust you, you deserve to know about your own blood.” Ulaz interjects, Keith jumps and whips his head towards the small Galra. 

 

Embarrassment settle heavy and dull in his gut. He can sense the others in the room emitting waves of fond amusement, and he can’t help but feel patronized. Like he’s missed some social cue that was blaringly obvious to everyone but him.

 

Keith coughs again and flicks his eyes back to Kolivan, seeking permission he probably doesn't really need. He gets a subtle nod from the leader as he looks back down to the datapad in his lap.

 

“I, yes, thank you. I’d really appreciate it.” Keith struggles out.

 

Thace waves his hand at Ulaz, forgiving him for abandoning their game and turns to speak with Antok. The smaller Galra steps up to Keith and looks down at him with a gentle smile on his face. 

 

“Why don’t you show me what you have so far? If need be we can come collect DNA samples later.” Ulaz proposes, gesturing in the direction Keith had just come from.

 

Keith jerks his head in agreement and follows Ulaz out of the common room. He scrubs a hand over his face again and silently berates himself for trying to struggle through conjecture on his own when there were experienced people in the castle. Pride.

 

He promises to himself to make better use of the resources he had. 

  
  
  


It starts with Ulaz and biology, with the cycle of researcher sharing the knowledge he has with the next generation of students. With the death of a tyrant, and the rebirth of a lost culture tainted by war. Something clicks into place in Keith’s chest, a process finally settling into the right tempo. It’s a good feeling to have. Hopefully, the trend will continue. 


End file.
